SkyFire Nabs $1 Million in First Weekend

It was so hot, it sold out the App Store a few hours after launch. Such, apparently, is the craving for Flash on the iPhone, regardless of what Steve Jobs may think. But what are the numbers behind "selling out" when we're just talking bits and bytes here?

The little browser that could -- that is, could put Flash on your iPhone -- had a great opening weekend. Not only did they move so many apps that the App Store "sold out" of them, but they also picked up some serious coin. While SkyFire wasn't dishing the exact figures, they shared with MobileCrunch the broad specifics. "Well over 300,00 downloads" in that first weekend alone. Quick math shows three dollars per download gets you to $900,000. Then subtract Apple's 30% take. And while gross may have been nearly a million, net shrinks down to a respectable $600,000+.

Plus on top of that, selling out the App Store nets you a ton of free publicity as tech sites who've been talking up your app's capabilities suddenly have a novelty story on their hands. Fresh news cycle, fresh batch of publicity. A double win for SkyFire.

Now, it takes a LOT of server juice to make the conversion from Flash content to HTML 5 friendly, which we imagine is what crushed their servers, both demand for the app and demand for the process. We certainly hope the gang at SkyFire, after they've spent a bit of that bounty on champagne to hose each other down with, are plowing their profits back into increasing server rack capacity.

Because when they get around to releasing their iPad version, you know the exact same thing's going to happen again...